{
  "id": "noticias-secretas-de-america",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Noticias secretas de America (Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa; printed London, 1826)",
  "summary": "The confidential report two Spanish naval officers wrote for the crown on what they had seen in Peru and Quito, and which the crown kept unpublished until a British editor printed it in London in 1826. It is the empire auditing itself: named mechanisms of extortion, the gap between the law and what happened in the provinces, and the authors' insistence that the crown's own tribute would have been a light burden if it had been the only one.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "peru",
    "quito",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "labour",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire",
    "navy"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lazarillo-de-ciegos-caminantes-1773"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "jorge-juan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "antonio-de-ulloa-platinum"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-para-el-tratamiento-de-los-indios-1513"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "clavijero-disertaciones-1780"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juicio-de-residencia"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "corregidor-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pedro-vicente-maldonado"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ulloa-noticias-americanas-1772"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juan-examen-maritimo-1771"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-astillero-de-guayaquil"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "obrajes-de-las-indias"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is the Noticias secretas de America?",
    "Did Spain investigate abuses in its own American colonies?",
    "What did Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa report about the corregidores?",
    "Why was the Noticias secretas published in London in 1826?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page states the commission and the secrecy in one breath. The Noticias secretas de America treat the naval, military and political state of the kingdoms of Peru and the provinces of Quito, the coasts of New Granada and Chile, and \"gobierno y regimen particular de los pueblos de Indios: cruel opresion y extorsiones de sus corregidores y curas\". They were written to the instructions of the Marques de la Ensenada, first Secretary of State, and presented in a secret report to Ferdinand VI, by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, lieutenant generals of the Royal Navy and members of the Royal Society of London and of the academies of Paris, Berlin and Stockholm.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The authors name the cause before describing the practice. The tyranny the Indians suffer, they write, is born of the insatiable hunger for riches carried to the Indies by the men who go out to govern them; having no other instrument to satisfy it than oppressing the Indians, they leave no method unpractised. They then divide the corregimientos into those where repartimientos are made and those where they are not — the second class covering the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Quito, Paraguay and the modern missions — and add that where the practice is not established the corregidores find so many other roads to tyrannise that they do not miss it.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The repartimiento de mercancias is described as a working mechanism, not an abuse in the abstract. The goods are mules, European wares and local produce; the amount allotted to each corregimiento is already regulated; a corregidor in the Lima viceroyalty must obtain the viceroy's pase in that city, which is also where he takes up the goods, on credit from a merchant who raises his prices knowing the profits the corregidor will make; then, entering his district, he begins with an enumeration of Indians by village, going in person, carrying the merchandise and assigning to each Indian the quantity and kind he thinks fit. Done with a moderate profit, the authors write, the practice would be sound; done as it then was, \"no le compete otro nombre, sino el de una tiranía la mas horrible que se pudiera inventar\".",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "On the mita the report is precise about the distance between statute and practice. The Indians assigned to it should serve for one year only and then return to their villages, remaining free until their turn came round again; but this formality laid down by the laws \"no se guarda ya\". The authors set the whole system against a single observation: everything the Indies produce being the effect of the labour of their native inhabitants, and these being the ones who contribute it, they are the ones who enjoy it least and who draw the least recompense from the toil of their tasks.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The obrajes, the textile workshops, are treated as the worst case and used to make a point about enforcement. They are where all the plagues of misery are gathered, and where the greatest pitiable sights that the most barbarous inhumanity can produce are found. Then the sentence that gives the document its value as evidence: various ministers of His Majesty had known this and had tried to issue the most serious provisions that reason dictated to them, \"pero la lástima ha sido, que en aquellos payses nunca se observan las disposiciones del gobierno\". Against that the authors set the diet and lodging of a labourer — a hut with no furniture of any kind, a sheepskin for a bed, no pillow, a capisayo for clothing that is not changed for sleeping, and two or three spoonfuls of barley flour taken with a great quantity of water or of chicha.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The report distinguishes the crown's law from the provinces' practice, and says the distinction came from the Indians themselves. Capitulo tercero is headed on the injustice of having dispossessed the Indians of most of the lands belonging to them and on the little protection they find in the protectores fiscales. In it the authors write that what is necessary to satisfy the contribution of tribute to His Majesty is the only charge that, by the pious dispositions of the Kings of Spain, they ought to bear — so moderate and regular that it would be no burden at all if they were reduced to it alone — and state that this is the sentiment of the Indians themselves, heard on different occasions from caciques and from many others who accompanied them in the places they visited.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The edition that made the report public was not a Spanish one and was not disinterested. The title page says the text was brought to light \"para el verdadero conocimiento del gobierno de los españoles en la America meridional\" by David Barry, printed at R. Taylor's press in London in 1826, at the close of the Spanish American wars of independence. Barry's prologue opens by calling the discovery of America the most important event in the history of the human race and names Spain as the nation to whom that discovery fell, with the Catholic Monarchs described as powerful, triumphant, active and ambitious.",
      "sources": [
        "barry-1826-prologo-noticias-secretas",
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Two limits belong on the record with the quotations. The printing read here is the 1826 London first edition and no manuscript was available to collate it against, so the fidelity of the printed text to what was handed to Ferdinand VI rests on the editor's assertion; and the authors were naval officers reporting on provinces they had crossed in the course of a geodesic mission, not resident magistrates, so their account of the corregimientos is inspection evidence rather than administrative record.",
      "sources": [
        "juan-ulloa-noticias-secretas-1826"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The Noticias secretas is usually cited in one of two useless ways — as proof that Spanish rule was uniquely cruel, or as a document Spain suppressed. Both skip the text. Read page by page it is something more interesting and harder to use as a slogan: a commissioned internal audit that names the mechanism of extortion step by step, states that the crown's ministers had already legislated against it and that in those provinces the government's dispositions were simply not observed, and argues that the royal tribute alone would have been a light burden. This object quotes those three things from the sheets, and registers the British editor who printed it in 1826 as the interested party he was.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
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    "name": "Noticias secretas de America (Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa; printed London, 1826)",
    "description": "The confidential report two Spanish naval officers wrote for the crown on what they had seen in Peru and Quito, and which the crown kept unpublished until a British editor printed it in London in 1826. It is the empire auditing itself: named mechanisms of extortion, the gap between the law and what happened in the provinces, and the authors' insistence that the crown's own tribute would have been a light burden if it had been the only one.",
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    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Noticias secretas de America, sobre el estado naval, militar, y politico de los reynos del Perú y provincias de Quito, costas de Nueva Granada y Chile — Parte I",
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        "name": "Prologo to Noticias secretas de America",
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